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Kick The Chair: How Standing Cut Our Meeting Times By 25%

A few months ago, I came across an article describing sitting as the new smoking. I had read articles like this before, but it stuck after seeing my friend Jeff’s personal standing desk. The article cited dramatic studies about the negative impacts of sitting all day. Sitting can impact your metabolism and affect the onset of type 2 Diabetes, and excessive sitting is positively correlated with breast, prostate, and lung cancer. One study found that men who spent two more hours sitting each day had a 125% increased chance of cardiovascular disease.

As someone who tries to exercise every day, I was ready to brush all of this off. “I’m in good shape, right? Sitting all day can’t affect me,” I thought. But the article claimed that even regular exercise cannot counteract the impact of sitting all day.

Maybe Jeff wasn’t one of those weird, hipster-tech guys. Maybe all this standing was improving his health in a meaningful way.

Stand-ups aren’t just for developers

Around the same time, we started moving to an Agile approach to software development for our new presentation, analytics and content marketing product, GetCourse. In Agile, your developers and product owners get together everyday for a “stand-up” to discuss what they worked on, what they will work on in the coming days, and blockers to their progress. Though our team did not stand up during these meetings, it’s dubbed a “stand-up.” The idea is to make these meetings quick and efficient by standing up, and for our GetCourse team, to have them last no longer than 15 minutes. Some teams even pass around a medicine ball to the speaker. When the weight sets in, that person is reminded to cut it short.

Fresh with the memory of Jeff’s personal standing desk in mind and the shock of studies which cited the harmful effects of sitting, it dawned on me: why not run my own meetings standing up? Why limit that to Agile developer “stand-ups” only?

Why standing meetings were efficient for my teams

Every Monday, I meet one-on-one with all our managers or small teams. I have five meetings that run, on average, for about 45 minutes to an hour. By the end of the day I’m exhausted. I started running these meetings standing up, and I’ve seen tremendous improvements.

Immediately I noticed that my meetings were shorter. For fun, I briefly tested the length of my meetings sitting vs. standing. Though not exactly a scientific experiment, I found my standing meetings lasted 36 minutes on average vs. 48 minutes sitting down. Melissa Dahl of New York Magazine recently wrote that standing up meetings can reduce meeting time by 34%.

When I asked my sales manager Maya why she thought our meetings were faster, she explained that standing made her “feel a shared purpose to get things done.” Josh, who is part of our GetCourse team said that “when standing, I mostly want to sit down.” You therefore want to be as efficient and thoughtful as possible.

Josh made this comment after a spirited debate on whether our blogging efforts would focus on marketing or HR topics. When I probed further he said that standing made him feel more alert. Put simply, he said “that it makes it much harder to fall asleep during a meeting.” I’ll take that.

I also noticed that our meetings felt more productive. After a thoughtful and introspective conversation while standing up, we decided to share what we are learning from our experiments building and marketing GetCourse. I asked Ross, our marketing manager, if he felt the meeting was as productive as I thought.

Ross pointed out the following:

1. Standing eliminated many distractions. He said notifications from our office chat system FlowDock, our chat messenger, would distract him when he typed up notes during sitting meetings. He also candidly admitted that during lulls in a regular meeting, he might try to answer an email. I was certainly guilty of this. Peering at a computer while standing, on the other hand, is awkwardly obvious.

2. Just as when you present during a meeting, you stand to command attention. When you speak during a stand-up meeting, you’re naturally commanding more attention and can be more expressive.

Standing meetings aren’t all roses

Pattie, our HR manager, told me that her note taking suffers during our stand-up meetings. When we discussed exceptions to our unlimited vacation policy, she had to later clarify important details with me because it was uncomfortable for her to bend over and type up notes.

In a meeting that lasted just over an hour, our instructional designer said that the standing was making her tired. In fact, she admitted she had trouble concentrating just thinking about when she might have the satisfaction of sitting.

Going forward, I’ll make sure we stand only during meetings of 30 minutes or less, and that important takeaways are written down.

Getting the best of both standing and sitting

Studies indeed show that excessive standing can be harmful. It can cause joint pain in your knees or varicose veins where blood flow from your legs to your heart is weakened.

I’ve found that standing up during my meetings provides the right healthy balance between standing up and sitting down. By standing up during my meetings, I’d like to think I’m getting the health benefits while also running more effective meetings. Win-win!

Improving my personal life

Physiologically, standing helps release endorphins, which increases your alertness and energy level. I’ve certainly noticed that I have more energy throughout the day, which helps my ability to impact our organization.

The best part is that I feel more energetic when I come home to my wife and newborn. I’m more eager to chat about my day and play with my little guy even when he is screeching away. I’m now standing on my 30-minute train ride back home. It’s great for me and my family.

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Thanks. The issue with this is that it fits *your* personal body. However, it’s a) literally impossible for someone who is wheelchair-bound b) incredibly uncomfortable for a significant (and growing) part of the population. AND, and here’s the kicker–those people are not (and I mean NEVER) going to tell you this. They don’t want to be fired, be “not a fit for our culture,” etc. Until you are sued or lose some of your best people.

Agreed about people with physical limitations. That something to be certainly conscientious of.

I think that discomfort can be an asset to stand up meetings. I found that people were more alert. However, there are bounds. My sense was that stand up meetings should be no more than 15-30 minutes. After that, it’s time to sit back down.

Also agree that no one will tell me this, but perhaps that’s all the more reason to limit this to shorter meetings. I’m going to explore asking different team members what they prefer for a meeting, or make standing optional. But those decisions may be still be partial, to your point.